So Many Books, So Little Time

by Sara Nelson

  I loved Love Junkie the minute I read it, back in about 1992. I’m not even sure how I came to read it, to tell you the truth, but it must have been a gift from one of my publishing friends, because all I found when I went looking for it last week was a set of proofs. (You saw the proofs, right? They have a red cover with a pair of lipsticked lips on it, which always sort of reminded me of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers record cover.) I hope this doesn’t offend you, but I think I was also drawn to it because of your name, which, just in case no one has ever mentioned it, is kind of funny. It makes me think of Esther Blodgett, the doomed Garland/ Streisand character in A Star Is Born, and of that jam commercial. You know, with a name like that, he’s got to be good.

  But I digress. The point is that I loved your book at least as much for what it wasn’t as for what it was: a book about gay life in the thick of the AIDS years that was only very tangentially about AIDS. That’s a pretty hard thing to pull off, Mr. Plunket, but you did it, even if the very few reviews published at the time were kind of snarky and dismissive about it: I hope someone close to you kept the Los Angeles Times review out of your house so that you never had to know that the critic called it a “très lightweight Madame Bovary” that seemed to have been “tossed off by its author in a couple of rainy afternoons.” (She tried to make up later by saying you were some kind of bizarre genius, but I wouldn’t forgive her if I were you.)

  You know what I think? That reviewer—and also the one in The Washington Post who dismissed the book as “a lark”—didn’t really get it. Didn’t they know that the early nineties weren’t exactly “gay,” to use the old-fashioned meaning, especially if you were gay, and that a lark was exactly what we needed just then? Didn’t they understand that a story about a lonely housewife befriended by a group of gay men was a great screwed-up parody of Candide? Didn’t they get that putting a stranger in a strange land was the perfect way to lampoon that land? I mean, other books about AIDS were important to read, and I read ’em all—Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On; Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World; and just about everything by Paul Monette—but none of them was exactly a laugh riot. They were more like the meat and potatoes your mother made you eat before she’d let you have dessert. Love Junkie was like the profiteroles you get served in mediocre Italian restaurants: flaky and pretty sweet on the outside, but surprisingly solid at the center.

  I sure as hell got it, I can tell you. I moved to New York City in the early eighties, and for some reason or other—some say it’s my Liza Minnelli haircut, but I vote for my, shall we say, rather dramatic manner—I’ve always had a lot of gay friends. I’m not saying that I was as lonely and pathetic as Mimi, or as much of a snob, but I, too, have been on the grand tour of the Pines, on Fire Island, and have hung around with people who could burst into show tunes at a moment’s notice. As a matter of fact, one of the most important people in my life up to that time was a guy named Artie Bressan. Maybe you knew him? He was an operatic singer and a director of porn films, sort of like the character Mimi hooks up with in Love Junkie, except that he was a lot nicer. He died in 1986. By 1992, I’d been a volunteer at an AIDS crisis center for about five years and had long since taken the advice Artie’d given me way back in 1985: I’d stopped counting my dead friends when I got to two dozen. You could say I was in desperate need of some comic relief—and you, dear Robert, became my knight in shining armor. You sent me Love Junkie.

  To be completely honest, there are other books that I remember fondly from previous readings, but they don’t always hold up under rereading. (If you want to know what they are, you’ll have to read my book, which is coming out soon.) So I’m generally not much of a fan of the book revisit: I always figure books are like buses and there will always be another one. And life is short: why waste time on something you already know, when you can discover something exciting and new?

  This is blasphemy, I understand. Most serious readers have a list of books they go back to when times get rough, or they get sad, or things are just plain boring. Last week, for example, my friend Mark told me he spent an otherwise lonely weekend at his lake house “rereading John O’Hara.” My sister Liza regularly rereads Trollope. There was recently a whole book published—Wendy Lesser’s Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering—in which the author revisits books from her adolescence and intellectual youth.

  That’s all well and good for them, I guess, but it seems to me that rereading—or claiming to reread—is just another way for some people to trumpet their intellectual superiority. To wit: have you ever known someone to say they’re “rereading” the oeuvre of, say, Jackie Collins? When I was in college, I may have been attracted to the guys with a slim volume of T. S. Eliot in their back pockets, but I wasn’t unaware that a lot of them were phonies. I bet you’d have been like my friend who used to joke about all the English-major scholar types—the kind who wrote 200-page theses on such arcane topics as “The Notion of Time in the Poetry of Keats”—who wanted you to think their first time around with important authors took place when they were still in the cradle. For them, there were not nearly as many bragging rights in saying “I’m reading Swann’s Way” as in saying they were “rereading” Swann’s Way—in French.

  But then last Wednesday morning I woke up with a throat so full of knives that I called in sick to work, something I hadn’t done since 1986 or so. I felt so bad even my husband took pity on me and offered to take the kid to school. By nine A.M., I was alone, which, as even poor lonely Mimi would have known, is a rare occurrence for a middle-aged wife and mother. I guess your Mimi would have spent the time planning her home redecoration or answering a few of her porn-star boyfriend’s fan letters, but that’s just not me. I’m more the good-student, keep-to-the-schedule type, so I figured I’d stay in bed and read. I definitely needed some chicken soup, of both the actual and spiritual kind. Luckily, there was Campbell’s in the cupboard and Love Junkie on the shelf.

  I’m happy to report that even on rereading ten years later, the book made me laugh out loud more than once. I have this habit of turning down corners of pages that contain something I like. Sometimes I’ll write in a book, but I try to avoid it. It’s so messy. And on that day I spent in bed with the sore throat, I turned down a lot of pages. I’d intended to quote from them for you, but there are just so many! And besides, many of them are of the long-setup, you-had-to-be-there variety, and I don’t want to waste your time. Suffice to say the book struck me as funny this time as last, and reading it while I was sick was comforting somehow. It was kind of like meeting up with an old boyfriend when you’re feeling fat and ugly and unlovable and discovering that you’re still attracted to each other. It’s exciting and familiar at the same time, a pretty great combo.

  Which, I guess, is the reason people reread in the first place: they like going into a book knowing what they’re getting at the same time that they can discover a line or a character or an attitude they missed the first time around. They like, in a world full of bad feelings and surprises, to know that the book they’re reading will offer up none of the above. They like, in other words, returning to the known.

  So I owe you one, Robert Plunket, first for making me laugh (again) and second for proving to my husband that there’s a reason to keep all these old books around the house even years after everybody stops talking about them (if, that is, they ever talked about them at all). But you never reread, he says. Now I can look him in the eye and say haughtily, just as Mimi might, “Do too!”

  May 5

  P.S. I Lied

  You know how I wrote that I’d read all those other books at the same time that I first read Love Junkie? Well, that’s not a hundred percent true: I’d never actually opened my hardcover copy of Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World, which has been sitting on my shelf since probably 1992. I’m usually not much of a liar; if you read my book, you’ll see I cop to a whole lot of important books I’ve never finished, or in some cases,
even started. But for years I just couldn’t admit that I’d never gotten to A Home at the End of the World: I wanted to read it, I meant to read it, and I read so much about it at the time that I’d started to think I had read it. (This must be what the author Joseph Ellis meant when he tried to explain away his lying about serving time in Vietnam; he’d told students for so many years he had been in the trenches that he actually started to believe he had been.) Also, Cunningham’s book was the kind of thing that would come up in conversation so often in those days, and so many people would nod reverently and say something about its being “one of the greatest books about gay life” they’d ever read that I found myself slowly over time nodding along with them. I mean, I never actually lied by commission, but I was happy to let people think I was one of them.

  But I couldn’t live with my guilt any longer. So right after I wrote to you, I went and got myself a paperback copy of the book (the easier to transport to work and back—and hey, tell Michael Cunningham to count the extra income as my penance for perjury) and raced through it over the weekend. And you know what? The story of two best friends, one gay and one straight—and the woman they both loved—is one of the greatest books about gay life I’ve ever read. I mean, it didn’t make me laugh out loud, and I didn’t turn back nearly as many page corners as I had in Love Junkie, but still I was very moved by it. In fact, when a friend asked me what she should read to help her deal with her son’s recent announcement that he was gay, I recommended Home. It’s just so rich with detail and character. I’m going to tell her about Love Junkie, too, I promise, but I think she might need a couple of years to get ready for that.

  I hope this doesn’t hurt your feelings. It doesn’t change mine, about you or your work. As a matter of fact, I feel more indebted to you than ever and for more than “just” laughter. Because of you, Mr. Plunket, I’ve decided never ever to lie again about what books I’ve read. No more lies, I don’t care whether they’re of commission, omission, or schmomission. If I haven’t read something everybody else says they did, I won’t say I have. If I didn’t like something everybody else says they did, I won’t say I do. Nope. Not me. You’re more than a great writer, I see that now: you’re an inspiration. I mean, who’d have thunk it, Mr. Plunket? You’ve done something most writers never do: you’ve made an honest woman out of me.

  May 12

  Baseball, Part I

  I’m sitting on a bench in a ball field on a beautiful spring afternoon when my cell phone rings: “Not now!” I growl into the phone to my friend Ira, whose name has popped up on the programmable thingy. “The bases are loaded, there are two outs, and it’s my kid up at bat.”

  Charley—in full Devil Rays regalia, including the purple T-shirt he ordered me to baste up so that it doesn’t hang to his knees like a dress—swings, in that tentative way that has become, in a few short weeks, characteristic. It’s as if he doesn’t expect to hit the ball and, ever self-conscious, makes the decision to stop midswing and shrug theatrically (“I don’t really care!”) to the crowd. “Strike one,” the umpire calls out, and all I can think is I’m glad he’s not the kind of announcer who apes TV sportscasters by extending the word “strike” to at least two syllables and relishing every one. These are the youngest teams in the Greenwich Village minor leagues, so, mercifully (I guess), they’re still using adult pitchers, and the coach pitcher now throws another one. “Strike two,” the umpire says softly.

  Now I’m really a wreck. “Take your time, Charley,” his wonderful coach, Jerry, calls out. I can barely watch, but since there’s no sound of contact in the next couple of seconds, I don’t even need to be able to hear. Charley has struck out. Again.

  Or as he says tearfully as we head home a couple of minutes later, “I always strike out, Mom! Every time!”

  I’m pretty shaky myself, but I try to pull it together. “All you need is a little practice, Charlino,” I say. “Jerry is going to play just with you for a couple of minutes before the next game, give you some pointers.” This is true: Jerry did say he’d “work with” him. What I don’t tell Charley—and what he didn’t hear, suggesting that there may, in fact, be a God—is the reaction of one of his teammates when number 11 struck out this last time. “Charley sucks,” muttered the little brat. “Sucks, sucks, sucks.”

  Is there an adult alive who had a good experience in organized sports as a kid? Are there parents whose hearts don’t clench as their offspring gets up at bat, runs for a ball, or reaches for a hoop, remembering in explicit detail the humiliations of their own youth? I suppose there are some—they’re probably the parents of the kids who never strike out and who will, in my most dearly held dreams, grow up to be serial killers or WorldCom executives or both—but there don’t seem to be many, at least not around these parts. Even Peter—Charley’s best friend Luke’s dad; tall, fit, roller-blading Peter—gets tears in his eyes when I tell him why Charley might be a little fragile in his postgame playdate that day. “Oh God, I know,” he says. “Every inning is like watching your life pass before you.”

  Nobody knows this better than I, who was routinely the last kid picked for the kickball, baseball, soccer, hockey, and whatever-else team. Chubby, self-conscious, and slow, that’s how I’d describe my ten-year-old self, and I cringe at the thought that those words could apply to Charley today. I remember field days at my grade school with precise agony, and the memory of my brief attempt, in junior high, to be a cheerleader almost makes me weep. One of the “bigger” girls, as the coach politely called me to my face, I was assigned to the bottom row of the human pyramid that we were to form after a game; four girls would climb on us six, and then two on those four and then—the thinnest, prettiest, and fittest would climb up on top. The coach must have been hoping that my bigness meant strength, but he was wrong: Just as skinny, pretty Susie Q (not her real name) bounded to the top of the pile, my chubby twelve-year-old knees gave way and I slumped, bringing all the other girls tumbling down beside me. If the humiliation in front of myself and my friends weren’t enough, get this: this was the practice at which they’d invited parents, so as I pitched forward onto the freshly mown field, the last face I saw was my mother’s. And she wasn’t smiling.

  So maybe Leo’s right that I’m projecting a lot of my own insecurities on Charley, but then, who, as a parent, doesn’t do that to his kid? And besides, those tears welling up as we’re walking home are real, and they’re his. But I’m at a loss for what to do. My motto generally has always been “When the going gets tough, the tough get reading,” but I’ve never been a fan of how-to books. Besides, I can hardly imagine poring over Baseball 101 at the dinner table. But then I remember one of the books I’d left on Leo’s pillow a few months back. So after Charley goes to bed that night, I open The Way Home and begin to read. Who knew that a charming memoir by New York literary agent Henry Dunow would turn out be the perfect parenting guide for a mother in my situation?

  Like me, Dunow didn’t exactly come from a sports-oriented family. His father was a Yiddish scholar, a Holocaust refugee, who embraced many things American but never quite understood his young son’s obsession with professional sports. In his household, as in both Leo’s and mine, after-dinner activity just about never included the patriarch’s taking his son outside to throw the ball around.

  Dunow is very frank about having wanted to reverse this trend, and so he volunteered to coach his son’s team, both as a means of bonding with the boy and of working out his own demons. The result: he was able to lay to rest some of his perceptions about his stunted development. (In a great aside, Dunow interviews other middle-aged men about their experiences. “There were no ‘great times, loads of fun, swell camaraderie, character building, Coach was like a hero to me’ reveries, he reports.”) He was also able to give his son some of the closeness he’d so sorely lacked.

  A friend of mine suggested that I tell Charley that it is the humiliations of childhood that a person, in later life, turns into art. I didn’t see much point in trying
that rationale on an eight-year-old. Nor is it useful to point out to said eight-year-old that he has many other, more important strengths, like an aptitude for math. (“I basically felt hated, like I smelled bad or something,” one of Dunow’s friends tells him about his childhood as a failed sportsman. “I was really good at spelling—but so what?”) But that is, in effect, what Dunow did with The Way Home; he artfully deconstructs the myths of childhood sports at the same time that he shows you how to survive them. Whether he meant to or not, he wrote the ultimate advice book.

  By the time I finished The Way Home, I found myself wanting to call up Henry Dunow and ask him to coach Charley’s team. (I’d already realized that asking him to father my child whom he could then coach would probably create more problems than it would solve.) I settled, instead, for torturing Leo into, as Dunow’s wife said, early in the book, “really being present” for his son. Obviously, Leo was not the type to sign himself up for coach the next year. (To be fair, he’s sweating along with me at most of the games, but between his crammed evening and weekend schedule and his admittedly low patience level, he’s not exactly coach material.) And surely, I’m not going to do it, even though my couple of outings with Charley have been beneficial to the kid in at least one respect: he now knows that there’s somebody on this earth who’s worse at baseball than he is. But if I wasn’t going to turn Leo into Henry Dunow, I could at least prod him into taking Charley out to practice.